“Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care,
for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often
hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that
I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—­Met!
True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre.
So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come
to that,—­ God for ever save thee, let what
will befall.”

(Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.)

“Here he this instant stood, I stand in his
air,—­but I’m alone. Now were
even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s
missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding!
Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s
try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor
bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It
must be the spell; he told me to stay here:
Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine.
Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the transom,
in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and
her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors
say, in their black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes
sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and
lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets!
epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding. Pass
round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs!
What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s
host to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—­Monsieurs,
have ye seen one Pip?—­ a little negro lad,
five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly!
Jumped from a whale-boat once;—­seen him?
No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and
let’s drink shame upon all cowards! I name
no names. Shame upon them! Put one foot
upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.—­Hist!
above there, I hear ivory—­ Oh, master!
master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk
over me. But here I’ll stay, though this
stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters
come to join me.”

CHAPTER 130

The Hat

And now that at the proper time and place, after so
long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab,—­all
other whaling waters swept—­ seemed to have
chased his foe into an oceanfold, to slay him the
more securely there; now, that he found himself hard
by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting
wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been
spoken which on the very day preceding had actually
encountered Moby Dick;—­ and now that all
his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly
concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which
the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or
sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something
in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable
for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar
star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months’
night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze;
so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon
the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It
domineered above them so, that all their bodings,
doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath
their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or
leaf.